Blogger Ali Eteraz will be on the radio 4:30 PM today PDT (check link for webfeed).

Chris Chatham has moved on over to Seed’s megasite finally. You could do a lot worse than reading his entries and the discussion he inspires. Here’s some on the potential for enhancing working memory with dopamine system manipulations.

SharpBlue on Rome vs. Assyria. Interesting fact, the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, could read and write (remember, this is before widespread use of phonetic script, so this was no mean feat). Thanks to Ashurbanipal’s library much of the corpus of Sumerian and Akkadian literature came down to us.

Life has been occupying me, why, between good wine (I prefer mild Chardonnay), work, books and beautiful women who detest science fiction I haven’t been able to resume my survey of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies. Nevertheless, I’d like to point you to Jason Rosenhouse’s Evolution Blog which has been putting the Science in ScienceBlogs. I especially enjoyed Chance, Stochasticity, Probability and Evolution, though I am of the opinion that these sort of disagreements are often more semantical than substantial. Terms like “adaptationism” and “punctuated equilibria” allude to a central tendency which emerges out of an extremely rugged conceptual topography. Once you agree on scale (molecular or morphological?) or taxon (mammaliam vs. drosophilid?) many of these “disputes” fade into the distance and science rises to the fore, sweeping aside petty egos. Or that’s the story that some would tell!
Strange fact of the day: Anastasius I, a Roman Emperor of the East who flourished in the late 5th century, was the last to be deified. This was one century after outright persecution of paganism began in the Empire, and nearly two centuries after Christianity became the the privileged faith of the Empire. I was induced to search out this fact because as I read The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather, the author recounted a mid-5th century incident when a Roman diplomat rebuked a colleague for comparing Attila the Hun to the Emperor Theodosius II, on the grounds that Theodosius was a god while Attila was a man. I will frankly admit that I expressed great surprise, seeing as how it was the family of Theodosius which managed to impose Christianity as the official religion of the Empire in a manner which served as a model for later relations between Church and State in Europe (e.g., Theodosius the Great’s tacit submission to Ambrose after the massacre at Thessalonika serves as a model for Henry at Canossa). It just goes to show that what might be blasphemy to later Christians was nothing of note to the early Imperial Christians who still carried forward their pagan ancestors’ sensibilities.

Post YouTube’s that you think are really interesting to GNXP readers in the comments.

Rate of Evolution in Brain-Expressed Genes in Humans and Other Primates:

Our analyses of the rates of protein evolution in these species suggest that genes expressed in the human brain have in fact slowed down in their evolution since the split between human and chimpanzee, contrary to some previously published reports. We suggest that advanced brains are driven primarily by the increasing complexity in the network of gene interactions. As a result, brain-expressed genes are constrained in their sequence evolution, although their expression levels may change rapidly.

…we’ve always told you that “gene expression” is where it’s at 🙂 It’s PLOS, so go read the whole thing for free.

I work on two machines in the mid-to-high 2 Ghz range with 1 gig of RAM on a regular basis. And yet the new YAHOO MAIL “Beta” has consistently crashed and throttled Firefox multiple times within the last few days. If your AJAX app does this you’re worse than Microsoft.
Client: Is my app Web 2.0^TM©® ready???
Me: Oh yeah baby, you won’t be able to find a desktop it won’t crash!

John Lynch has a post up about Richard Dawkins’ lack of theological sophistication in The God Delusion. John is basically reiterating the point that Dawkins did not truly engage theological arguments for theism on a very high or sophisticated level. In fact, John levels the implicit charge that Dawkins’ engagement of theology mirrors the level of good faith that Creationists render toward evolutionary science. Though I am a Neville Chamberlain atheist I am ambivalent about the theological tack. I’ve told Chris that I think that making a stand on theology isn’t the best strategic choice, and though it is tactically sound (i.e., Dawkins is almost proudly ignorant and dismissive of theology in his work) I believe it will lead to long term problems. The short of it is that I believe that the coherency of theology is implicitly presuppositionalist. By this, I mean that Christian theology is coherent and persuasive when one presupposes a Christian set of axioms. I believe theology can assuage and aid in belief, but in the vast majority of cases I doubt it is necessary or sufficient. One could say that science is also presuppositionalist, one must assume a coherency and rationality about the world around us, and generally reject excessive solipsism.
But, there is a difference: science is testable via the world around us, and, it leads to engineering. No matter its manifold flaws, it works. In contrast, theology must remain at remove from the world. Some arguments (e.g., the teleological argument) are informed by the world around us, but fundamentally they operate via a chain of propositions derived from axioms and observations in a rather abstract domain. Mathematics is similar, but I hold that its formalism renders it objectively transparent. In contrast theology’s verbal logic is more opaque and must be mediated by social consensus. The truths of theology are arrived via consensus as opposed to an independent cognitive process.¹ The historical record suggests that theology explores a sample space of ideas etched out by contingencies which are derived from human sociology. By an large theology is what cognitive anthropologist Scott Atran would term a “quasi-propositional” system. It has the general form of logic, but its overall direction is dictated by extra-analytical parameters (theologians may get to God in different ways, but in the end, they know that God exists and that the concept is sensible).

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I stopped playing video games when I was 16. So I don’t get a lot of the references of the below comparison… (guess which one likes science fiction)

[below the fold for after work]

On this bloggingheads.tv segment Ann Althouse rips Jonah Goldberg for his quasi-defense of a discussion of the ideas and influence of Frank Meyer, the libertarian conservative who was the father of “fusionism” and arguably the man behind William F. Buckley’s throne. Althouse was appalled that at a Liberty Fund event to which she was invited a discussion of the great man’s ideas did not dwell long enough upon his support for the American South’s practice of Jim Crow in the name of State’s Rights (perhaps one might say that Southerners supported State’s Rights because of Jim Crow, while Meyer accepted Jim Crow because of State’s Rights). Althouse’s point, from what I can gather, is that Oh my god Frank Meyer was a racist!!!! Goldberg made, I thought, a pretty level-headed response, sometimes one must extract and abstract ideas from their context to explore fully their ramificatins, validity and utility. This does not mean that I don’t share Althouse’s discomfort, even censure, of Jim Crow and the Right’s support of these policies during the 1950s and 1960s. The Zeitgeist has changed, and for the better. Especially for those like myself who happen to have brown skin. Nevertheless, there are two issues that we must address

1) Ideas are not like a stew, each and every one mixed together so that they are fundamentally inseparable, unperceivable without tasting the whole.

2) To examine questions from every angle one must withold judgement, censure or outrage on occasion.

This does not negate emotion, feeling or values. It simply means that different aspects of life, and cognition, have their own purposes. Margaret Sanger was a progressive racialist eugenicist. That doesn’t mean that Planned Parenthood is Nazi. Isaac Newton was an alchemical nut. That doesn’t mean that his Mechanics and Optics don’t exhibit a scientific virtuosity which induces awe. Emotions tell us what is important. Rationality allows us to realize and perpetuate what is important.